How do you go about building trust? I’m currently working with two executive directors who are new at their organizations, one small and one mid-sized. Both are exceptional leaders, excellent with donors, and have led other organizations. Building trust is at the top of their agenda. Their first task is to quickly build trust with board and staff, funders and donors, clients, partners, and stakeholders to effectively lead the organization through a transition that can shake an organization.

As executive directors, they feel that past behaviors that have proven successful will again carry them into this new organization. They know that leading others requires that they first trust you. Take action to overcome distrust: as Stephen Covey says, “My experience is that significant distrust doubles the cost of doing business and triples the time it takes to get things done.”

Building trust: Potentially turbulent waters

Your board of directors are the ones most likely to champion you. After all, they interviewed you and had an opportunity to get to know you and choose you to lead the organization. In fact, they are often excited about your vision, or your strengths in improving programs or fundraising.

But staff is often another story, especially if they are attached to the previous executive. Trust begins when you recognize that they want (and deserve) to be listened to, and be acknowledged for their work in the trenches. Remember, learning to interact productively with new people who have diverse ideas, styles, and preferences is a difficult challenge for everyone. Here are some things to consider:

They might not tell you everything because knowledge is power. If possible, take the time to get to know them, and don’t start changing things immediately. Also remember, that staff might feel threatened by these requests and resist requests for information. They might resent changes to schedules and new meetings. Instead, ask how they would solve the problem of scheduling to bring you up to speed.

Rather than giving them orders, give suggestions such as “you might consider . . .”

They have “habit” patterns of doing things that work for them. Seek to understand why and how, and if change is really needed.

Sometimes, its a simple difference of style between the previous director and you. Let’s face it, sometimes executives are ineffective at networking with those below them because they’re focused on the board and donors.

Staff might not have been made accountable, or they may not have had annual goes tied to the strategic plan. So, suggestions for change from you need to aligned to how they are integral to achieving the mission, to living their own potential. What does success look like to them?

You can become the person who helps promote, accept, and make change happen. Your leadership effectiveness begins with you.

Building trust is a critical competency of leadership.

It is the one leadership trait that you need first, before anything else – your future depends on it. And, it’s a skill that can be learned, applied, and understood. It is something that each leader can get good at, measure and improve. You’ll need to build trust when you start, and you’ll need it to grow, change and lead into the future.

There are two ingredients to creating trust: character and competence.

Character means you have integrity, and you show others respect. And it also means you are responsible for your words and actions; you treat people fairly. Most people can immediately intuit your motives and intent with them. Thus, the foundation of trust is your own credibility. A person’s reputation is a direct reflection of their credibility, and it precedes them in any interaction.

How do you know you’re not trusted ?

Staff withhold information: They may do this for several reasons. However, it’s most likely that they’re withholding information because they are fearful of your reaction.

Solution: hold a team meeting or one-on-one meeting, make it clear what you need to know and why. Openly ask if there any concerns they have in disclosing information to you. Give them an example of a recent incident where information was not disclosed. Then, ask them what would have to change to make it easier for them to disclose information when you need it. Reinforce that want to build strong open relationships with everyone and that you are always open to feedback. This is step one in building trust.

They are disrespectful: Staff show this by not following direct orders; or they don’t complete tasks on time; worse, they try to discredit you; or they completely ignore your requests.

Solution: hold a team meeting. Tell them you’ve observed behaviors from the staff that is really impacting achieving results, and you’d like to understand why. Ask to hear their solutions. Allow them to talk. Stay calm. Don’t interrupt or get defensive. When you decide what you will implement, share your decision with them. You don’t have to agree with all of them. You will build trust quickly when you show that you have listened to them, you have taken their opinions into account, and are implementing the solutions they have suggested. [You also might not implement their suggestions – make sure to thank them, and let them know what your concerns are about their solutions. They will still feel heard.]

The staff is guarded and keep to themselves.

Solution: Actually, this is pretty normal. So, make the first move – they’re waiting for it. Be personable and friendly – smile and find opportunities to chat, have lunch, and give them an opportunity to get to know you.

So, how might you approach building trust?

Talk straight – be transparent – clarify expectations

Demonstrate respect – listen and clarify – extend trust first

Right wrongs as you become aware of them

Keep commitments and walk the talk

Show loyalty to staff when tough situations arise

Be accountable.

Recognize and celebrate achievement.

Be willing to talk about the importance of learning and that we learn from our mistakes.

Remember that you can’t do it alone. Keep focused on getting to know each of them better.

Keep showing that you are there for them and want them to succeed.

I’d be interested in knowing what ways you are building trust with your staff. Please share in the comments below!

Getting to the next level through coaching

Think coaching is only for senior leadership? You appear to have missed one of the biggest ways leaders improve their skills and performance. Working with a coach may help push you up the ranks too.

When you move up the ranks, you will be having a different level of conversation from what you’re having now. You will be expected to think and make decisions about subjects not in your own expertise or skill sets, and you will be expected to lead people whose job you couldn’t necessarily do yourself. You’re now in a team or group of leaders that help transform the company or nonprofit and are no longer just fullfilling your own function area. Sometimes you will need to deliver difficult messages, and navigating the politics at this level requires new skills.

Working with a coach focused on you

Working with a coach provides a safe and confidential place to share your challenges with someone who is qualified to help you. A good coach helps you to find your own path as well as decide on your management style, all in a supportive environment without judgement. Coaching is non-judgmental listening – helping people to think through the decisions they are in. People often have artificial obstacles in their mind. Coaching can help people reframe issues, so they can resolve those problems.

Recently I worked with an executive director who came in as president of a large nonprofit. She was struggling to work out how to work with flat organizational chart, especially given that funding was in peril for an important division. So, instead of working with the chart as it currently stood, we instead wrote the chart as would be serve the highest potential of the organization. We went from 12 direct reports to 4, one of which was a position that did not exist previously. She then began to rewrite titles and responsibilities, and determine who best fit those roles. The obstacle was thinking she needed to work with the current situation, rather than transforming it.

Building your interpersonal style through coaching

Most leaders must rely on their influencing skills to win people over in getting them passionate about the next strategy, or to discuss new ideas, and coaching to perfect your interpersonal style can be very useful. It’s particularly important for developing relationships with investors, donors, and partners. It allows you to think about how you are going to take others with with you when they don’t always trust the message or strategy.

Like seeing a therapist, the relationship between coach and client is confidential. The coach helps the client outline the goals they set to become a leader, and discussing the ROI they want to deliver in terms of impact.

Are you the next leader?

With increasing focus on having a more diverse leadership team and companies are looking into talent pools that they may have previously dismissed. Nonprofit executives are retiring, and boards often think they need to go outside the organization for the next leader. Instead, companies and nonprofit benefit when get people ready for leadership roles. And coaching can help develop people who may have all the firepower, but not all the leadership skills or experience.

Coaching helps leaders to self-reflect. To be really effective, they have to know who they are and what their motivation is. This is a skill that any person can use in lifting their career path. When we’re connected to our strengths, we find the fire we need to lead.

We need a fresh start and conscious awakening. If you’re like me, your lives are flooded with information from every direction. And we have become very good at selecting the information we choose to let in, to affect us, to learn from, to judge others and ourselves by, and to believe. We filter that information by choice on how it fits our beliefs, our experiences, our worldview, and our desires. Inevitably, we reject the information that doesn’t seem to directly fit. Thus, if we find ourselves reacting to the content of information and it makes us feel uncomfortable, or afraid, or helpless, we reject it, or get angry, or pretend we didn’t see it.

Dead or alive?

As we are all connected on a deeper human level, we can’t pretend we didn’t consume it. Unfortunately, that information remains inside of us and shows up as an unconscious worry, doubt, anxiety and depression. Or, we experience feelings that bubble up related to that information, but don’t know why. Most of all, we just want to stop feeling that way. We feel brittle, ghost-like. So, we try to ignore the feelings: we eat, drink, anaesthetize ourselves with medication, with shopping or trips, with mindless entertainment. Or it shows up as anger, lack of compassion, lack of focus. In ways that matter, we begin to deaden ourselves. It’s as if we willourselves into stressful, reactionary, unhappy and frantic lives. As Sigmund Freud said, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.” And as we suffer, so do our families, our colleagues, and our communities. When that happens, we become less than our true selves. We no longer are living our highest potential.

It’s time for a fresh start – to awaken

When you go through a conscious awakening, you undergo a period of intense change and revelation in your life.

If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing. –Gail Sheehy

Conscious awakening doesn’t mean that you shut out the information, the news, the situations we face. So, it requires that we take a step back for a moment and find a breath of distance. A breath of distance is when we stop and breathe and focus fully on what we are seeing, hearing, reading. Perhaps, we listen fully to the person who is speaking. Since the breath allows us to find clarity, we can make a choice on how we want to respond. When we choose a breath of distance, we move past the urge to complain – complaining is a negative release of energy that disempowers us. Or it releases stress, anxiety, and anger.

Consciousness leads t0 intuitively and creatively taking action

Christof Koch, Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, tells us: “Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. Wherever there is integrated information, there is experience.” The more we move to being conscious, the more we understand ourselves and the world. A conscious awakening begins with a quiet moment as we go inside to question our beliefs and reactions. Here you find answers to your suffering and can make peace within moments of silence. Most importantly, this is where you will recognize your spirit, your purpose, and your ability to choose. What reflects your highest potential? As we begin to figure out whether we can change something and how, we can take conscious action. Or, sometimes we choose to surrender to the situation within ourselves. A fresh start might mean walking away in order to go within, or working with a coach on mindfulness.

All humans connect through consciousness. So, how we think, act, react, and believe ripples out from us into the world and affects others. Consequently, we have a responsibility to one another to respond to the world from a place of consciousness.

How does mindfulness benefit my business?

Mindfulness benefits business but only if you use it. If you’re a start-up company, a freelancer, a small business, or a nonprofit, you are stressed – about money. Stressed thinking does not lead to good decisions, more sales, or improved relationships. It damages our health. In our agitation, we often focus on small things we can control, rather than bold moves. We try to manage the details of what we are already doing rather than calmly analyzing what’s going well and what’s failing. We are unable to come up with creative solutions.

And what is failure anyway? Failure is part of critical growth. Did you see a child give up walking after falling down? Of course not. You see them learn to hold onto things, to take shorter walks, and to fall down but get up again. There are dozens of studies on how mindfulness practices can improve our stress levels, and our sleep. Stress can also have a huge impact on our creativity and decision-making.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. Winston Churchill

Creative paralysis is fear of failure

We procrastinate in making hard decisions, and holding the hard conversations we dread. It’s as if avoiding things will make it get better. Mindfulness benefits include converting our fear of failure to action. One of the most frequent sources of creative paralysis is fear of failure. It’s nonaction that keeps us stuck doing the same thing over and over with no improvement rather than risk ‘failure.’

So, back to mindfulness and what benefits it brings to my business. Mindfulness does 4 important things for business leaders: it brings focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion (for yourself, and others) back into your field of awareness. I recently was working with a nonprofit executive. She was simply unable to see how her reluctance to create an earned revenue program was keeping her tied to fickle foundation funding. When we began to explore her beliefs around money using mindfulness, she began to let herself explore new opportunities. Mindfulness benefits for her were connecting again with skills in leadership that she could use in this new endeavor. And, happily she was able to gain foundation dollars to support the launch.

Mindfulness benefits: is it really as simple as breathing?

Breathing is where you begin to focus your attention. And the breathing that is part of mindfulness work is where you start to get some distance from the pressure of current issues. It’s where you start to tune into what your body is feeling, and the emotional surges that upset your day. Mindfulness is a practice which means you might try to do it every day, or even several times a day. You do it because the practice bears fruit within days of keeping at it. You can read more about the steps to mindfulness here.

When you go to the beach, you breathe in the salt air, you feel the warm sun on your lips, and the wind across your shoulders. You notice the ocean, the sky, the sand as you gaze at the ocean waves coming in and out. You often find you’re not thinking about much of anything. And, you can probably see mindfulness benefits easily in this scenario.

Now imagine having a moment like that in your day where instead of waves, you see those things you believe to be failures, or irritating people, or worrisome sales numbers also floating in and out with the breath. Can you be a witness and observer and look at it on all sides? In a place of detachment, can you step back and let it just be without assigning pejoratives, and see what isn’t working?

Shifting beliefs

Mindful benefits your ability to face what scares you. It is possible to see how your beliefs and thoughts can be transformed to ones of confidence, to courage, to a creative solution as we see how to shift our usual patterns by becoming more aware of them. And, your mind can become a bridge from the problem to the answer.

Mindfulness is key to success – busyness is not

Today I talked with a small group of women entrepreneurs about the importance of mindfulness in their day. One of the women described her day. It includes running from phone call to a meeting to picking up kids. Followed by making dinner, answering emails to creating a presentation. Her day consists of checking off tasks and activities as she went as she juggles a burgeoning business and a young family. She shared that emotionally she feels drained and overwhelmed. And yet, every day she thinks she was being successful: “I am accomplishing a great deal and something useful seems to be getting done, and I am getting lots of positive press for my business.”

Is this how you measure success?

We spent some time in practicing some mindfulness pauses. She revealed that she was equating a busy schedule and positive reviews with a happy life. She began to notice that she was never fully present in any moment or activity, already skipping ahead mentally to the next thing. “I’m simply going from meeting to activity on my daily schedule,” she said, “but I’m not really there.” I’m driving my kids while thinking about my last meeting, and looking at a paper for my next conversation. I never have enough time to focus on the next innovation needed in my business. Then it’s time to put the kids to bed, and stay up till midnight responding to emails and preparing my presentation that’s in two days. I fall into bed at night just to wake up the next morning and start all over. I’m exhausted.”

By recognizing how much time we spend in a mental state known as continuous partial attention, we deprive ourselves of fully living. We feel anxious about more complex situations as we don’t take the time to give it our full attention. We seem to expect ourselves to multitask, efficiently answering emails while on a conference call. Sound familiar?

Ghosting, the opposite of mindfulness

I call this ‘ghosting,’ where one’s form appears to be solidly present but the life force inside is vapory and permeable, hovering around the edges of your life. And when you’re in this state of being, you lose touch. You no longer know what motivated you in the first place. You don’t recognize the person you envisioned yourself to be as the lead in your own life. But now, there are others who depend on you.

So how can you choose differently?

This requires a change in your beliefs about success norms. As a culture, everyone tries to copy and reengineer what we observe as success with others we admire. But that is often a focus on the past which had its own circumstances, rules, norms, and relationships. Comparing our lives, choices, relationships, successes to another can be a learning experience. But it can also be a slippery slope to devaluing the uniqueness of your own market, relationships, expertise and intuition. In being focused, you allow your own creativity and relationships develop new choices that enrich your life and fit your goals.

So where does mindfulness fit in this?

When you bring your full attention into the present moment, you become alert. You hold an inner focus – a fuller consciousness of what responses you can choose to challenges that are being presented in this moment. Or, you may begin to hear the sounds around you, take note of the day and weather, or the aches in your body. As you pay attention to your breath, bringing your awareness more into your body, you release a bit of what has been so important just the moment before. In that moment, a more fully conscious recognition of what is real and what is “drama” becomes possible. You begin to register what your arguments for and against the situation are as your values and beliefs arise. It may include an arising of your instincts or intuition, your “knowing” of what should happen next. You are able to listen more fully to your business partner. Or you find yourself enjoying your child’s recitation about the field trip experience today. In that moment, you can respond fully rather than react or push away these moments as distractions not on your checklist.

Mindfulness is a moment by moment practice

Creating a better future is dependent on the seeds you plant in the present moment. Planting seeds requires a full and complete acceptance of the present moment, one without judgement. Being present in this way helps you to have clarity about where to focus. And being nonjudgmental allows you to have compassion for yourself, and be more fully you in any moment. No more ghost, but rather a full present human. So here you are. Can you pause in your hurried, complicated, and entangled life to be present in this moment? You can begin by stopping and focusing on your breath. Where do you feel it in your body? In your nostrils? Can you just focus there for this moment now?

Mindfulness is the key to an enriching life and successful leadership.

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